L. S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works, Volume 4: Pedology of the Adolescent II: Pedology of the Transitional Age as a Psychological and Social Problem

This book contains a new translation of the second half of the Pedology of the Adolescent by the renowned Soviet thinker, educator and teacher L.S. Vygotsky. It was a correspondence course written by Vygotsky for teachers across the Soviet Union, and it constitutes the longest work published in his lifetime. Four chapters have never been translated before and appear here for the very first time. With this volume, Vygotsky concludes the sustained argument he commenced in Vol. 3 Pedology of the Adolescent I: Pedology in the Transitional Age, establishing the borders of pedology, the nature of the transition between childhood and adulthood, and the concrete nature of the distinction between the lower psychological functions we largely have in common with animals and those that are specific to fully social humans. In this volume Vygotsky "puts flesh on the skeleton" of his working hypothesis concerning the interests and the development of concepts in the psychology of the adolescent. He then frames concepts as a special case of developing higher psychological functions, and demonstrates the roots of that development in the social environment. Many of the problems Vygotsky broaches in these new chapters--the choice of a profession, the initiation of the adolescent into working life--are still of immediate, not to say urgent, relevance today. The volume concludes with a remarkable vision of a society "where production is organized for the producers" that still seems far ahead of its time and still ahead of our own.